Newsletter of the Southern African Botanical Diversity - SANBI

The impact of years of post-colonial
dormancy, the crippling effects of civil
wars and political instability have left their
mark on the intellectual capital of botanical
knowledge in many southern African
countries (Huntley 1998). Today, most
of the expertise lies outside the national
institutions. With national herbaria as
focal points, botanical institutions have
experienced a gradual recovery as part of
the Southern African Botanical Diversity
Network (SABONET) Project, a Global
Environment Facility (GEF)/United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP)
project (Siebert & Smith 2004).
The Red List compilation for the southern
African region (6,000,000 km 2 ) was produced
under the auspices of SABONET
(Golding 2000) with funding from the
World Conservation Union (IUCN) Regional
Office for Southern Africa (ROSA)
over 30 months. Golding (2001a) provides
an overview of the SABONET
Red List Project in SABONET
News 6(3).
Collaborative research and consolidation
of technical information
culminated in comprehensive accounts
of priority threatened plant
species for more countries than any other
regional Red Listing initiative in Africa.
Over 3,900 plant species from ten southern
African countries, namely Angola,
Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique,
Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia
and Zimbabwe were subjected to 4,100
assessments, and assigned a category of
threat based on the internationally accepted
principles established by IUCN.
The results showed that 10 percent of the
region’s flora is in urgent need of conservation
action (Golding 2002).
The SABONET publication of plant Red
Data Lists (Golding, 2002) has therefore
been one of the most significant and encouraging
recent contributions to the conservation
of southern Africa’s flora — see
comments by Peter Raven and Achim
Steiner in the project newsletter (Siebert
& Mössmer 2003). This is an example of
how Red Lists have provided southern
African herbaria with an ‘entry point’ to
collaborate with local plant diversity specialists
(Golding & Smith 2001) to produce
stable, yet adaptable accounts of the endangered
plant species of the region and
the threats they face. The project was an
essential step towards bridging the gap
and transforming the field experience of
stakeholders and researchers, and the data
housed in herbaria, into accessible, usable
and useful information products (Golding
2001b) that can improve and expand the
conservation activities of conservationists
and governments in the region (Golding
& Timberlake 2003).
Red Lists have a broad application for
identifying conservation priorities at the
level of species and their core habitat
requirements. Their inherent value facilitates
resource planning, adds impetus to
threatened species conservation and value
to indigenous resources, and also affords
objective insights into the exploitative
extraction of natural resources (Izidine et
al. 2004). The benefits that this acquired
knowledge holds for conservation in
Africa are apparent and plentiful, but
what are the costs in terms of human and
financial resources to undertake a project
of this kind? This paper reports on the
southern African experience and the ‘price
paid’ to produce conservation-oriented
information. It is hoped that this quantification
will assist similar future initiatives
to develop cost-effective strategies and to
The SABONET publication of plant Red Data
Lists (Golding, 2002) has therefore been one
of the most significant and encouraging recent
contributions to the conservation of
southern Africa’s flora.
aid donor agencies with project development
decisions.
Data collection
From the start of the project, management
kept detailed spreadsheets that recorded
details of all meetings and workshops.
Subsidiary data were added, including
the number of workshop participants,
professional background of participants
(taxonomist, ecologist, field botanist, etc.),
workshop costs (air travel, accommodation
and similarly large expenses), and
the number of taxa assessed during work
sessions. Data were analysed in terms of
human and financial resources respectively
using simple techniques (project
Disa erubescens. (Photo: SABONET)
statistics are available on the project web
site: www.sabonet.org).
There have been detailed evaluations
of the expenditure of SABONET funds
as a function of products delivered. For
instance, Smith et al. (2003) found that
it cost USD 3.67 for each of the 450,000
herbarium specimens to be captured on
computer as part of the SABONET project.
It was probably one of the most cost-effective
initiatives in the world to document
plant life. It would appear that SABONET
produces good-value-for-money products,
and makes these available free of charge.
Similarly, the Red Data List project also
proved to be cost-effective, with the complete
process of assessing 4,100 threatened
species costing USD 38 each (Table 1).
Pitman & Jorgenson (2002) estimated
that a Red List project in a mega-diverse
region cost < USD 100/species. As one of
the world’s mega-diverse regions
(Groombridge & Jenkins 2002),
southern Africa managed to spend
just 38 percent of the maximum
predicted cost.
However, the calculations are not
flawless. It is assumed that it costs
exactly the same to assess any plant species,
be it detailed counts of rare species
in nature or desktop evaluations of type
collections of extinct taxa. The approach
followed does not differentiate between
groups that might be more or less expensive
to assess; yet one cannot do an
analysis any other way due to the nature
of the available data.
Plant assessments in Europe
The Swedish ArtDataBanken has also
estimated the costs involved in assessing
their threatened species, including
co-ordination, collection and dissemination
expenses. They assessed about 5,000
species in-depth and red-listed 4,100 (U.
Gärdenfors pers. comm.). The total cost
involved ranged between USD 200,000
and 250,000 – excluding the cost of compiling
detailed information sheets about
every single species. If we consider the
total amount spent, it cost between USD
49 and 61/taxon to determine the threat
status of the 4,100 species. This means it
costs nearly twice as much in Europe as
it does in (southern) Africa to assess the
status of threat of a plant species. By world
standards therefore the SABONET Red
List initiative was a cost-effective exercise
to assess the status of threat of plants on
a regional scale.
SABONET spent 26 percent of its total
funds on the co-ordination of the project,
SABONET News Vol. 9 No. 1 September 2004
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